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Workings of Ancient Calculating Device Deciphered
palegray.net writes "Scientists have discovered new meaning behind the functions of the Antikythera Mechanism, which has been referred to as the oldest known analog computing device. In addition to providing a means to calculate the dates for solar eclipses, the device apparently tracked the four-year cycles of the Olympiad. From the New York Times article: 'Only now, applying high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography, have experts been able to decipher inscriptions and reconstruct functions of the bronze gears on the mechanism. The latest research has revealed details of dials on the instrument's back side, including the names of all 12 months of an ancient calendar.'"
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
For those interested here are the data sets and some nifty images available to download:
The Data
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
when they found it, it was flashing 12.
I've always marveled at the "how did they do that" nature of such discoveries and honestly makes me realize an incredible loss of knowledge and skill occurred somewhere in the past (Dark Ages perhaps) that set us back thousands of years.
... also the first known example of "feature creep"
The article is dated tomorrow. NYT needs a device for calculating time more precisely.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
now we, computer geeks, can claim ancient greek heritage.
how cool is that, hmmm ?
What ? Me, worry ?
I'm imagining Beowulf imagining a Beowulf cluster of these things.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v454/n7204/abs/nature07130.html
I, for one, welcome our new analog computing overlor...
What do you mean, "They're dead"?
Life is short; think quickly.
Isn't this the eighth or ninth time this year that they've "discovered" the inner workings of this damn thing?
It's hard to say. They're also using the device to keep count... They think.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
But some idiot lost the boot cog and it won't work with any known version of GRUB, LILO, SYSLINUX or LOADLIN :(
Historians speculate that if someone could get it to boot up, it would run faster than a modern PC running Vista!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
With your bronze gears and such tomfoolery. Back in my day we sisn't even have abacuses. We had to count everything by hand, do the math in our heads, and remember it!
Now get off my lawn, and take your newfangled gizmo with you!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I'm imagining Beowulf imagining a Beowulf cluster of these things.
Nah, if anything, I can imagine Beowulf ripping out one of its clock hands and throwing it to the sea
No sig for the moment.
Once they finish working this out, I would really be interested if someone manages to reproduce a working version.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Bad example; when working as a speech-writer for legal disputes, Demosthenes was actually criticized for revealing his arguments to his opponents before trial; though considered unethical at the time, that approach seems pretty consistent with open source. He also published all of his speeches so that students could learn from them; again, very much an open source practice.
Don't let the patent trolls know any of this. I am sure they each have ten patents on the operation of this device.
You hook it up to the Baghdad Battery.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Okay, it computes dates. So does it also end on December 21, 2012?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
So my point here is that "scientific" computer models should be greeted with skepticism, even when they accurately predict. They should be absolutely scorned when they fail to accurately predict. There are a whole bunch of "scientists" out there running computer similations that are far less predictive than this device that is likey based on a geocentric theory of the universe.
The wikipedia article indicates that people think the device was designed with compactness in mind. So why would you add the feature of calculating when 4 years had passed? It's already keeping track of the months, so couldn't you just count them as they went past? Did I miss something?
You've clearly never developed software for salespeople.
The original Roman calendar had ten months, yes, and actually only covered about 300 days, with most of winter considered off-calendar. However, by tradition, the second Roman king, Numa Pompilius reformed this calendar and added January and February (at the end of the calendar), giving the year 12 months (and so at this time, the names of December, etc. as numbered months still made sense). This was the calendar used (with modifications) from roughly 700 BC to the introduction of the Julian calendar in 46BC. The calendar of Numa Pompilius ended up with some crazy leaps and intercalations to keep it reasonably in line with the solar year, so reform was definitely due.
In doing so, the Romans consulted with Greek astronomers, who had a lot of data about such things (though the Julian calendar is merely a solar calendar that keeps pretty good time with the moon, and not a true lunisolar calendar like one based on the Metonic cycle would be). Greece at the time of the Antikythera mechanism (about 50-100 years earlier than the Julian reform), had in fact just come under Roman control.
In addition to reforming the "leap" system, January got pushed to the start of the year, making the "number-names" months no longer descriptive, and the months of Quintilis and Sextilis were renamed for Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar, respectively.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
The didn't exactly LIKE one another but they intermarried and got along. Alexander the Great (or rather more to the point, his father Phillip the Great) was Macedonian and would come to rule pretty much all the Greek Islands and (by the end of Alexander's life) most the known ancient world all the way to India.
There is clear references in Alexander's diary that he suffered some discrimination as a child for being a Macedonian but it was like the difference between a modern-day Scottish and Welsh. Very much like that actually. Ultimately the political differences were small and the cultural differences even smaller. Small enough for Macedonians to become the first Greek emperors anyway.
Now as for Macedonians having been Slavic - that is a bit of a stretch, the slavic nations as we typically think of them didn't really come into their own for close on a thousand years AFTER the time of Alexander, though they outlasted the Romans by a bit they appeared around the same time.
I would say it's plausable that the Slavics may have had Macedonian ancestry, since Macedonia was quite possibly the first settlement of any kind of civilization in Europe but that far back we have almost no evidence of anything and that is pure conjecture. The Slavics could just as easily have been there 10 thousand years earlier and just not left any earlier evidence. To say they may be descended from Macedonians is plausable, but no more so than to say they may have been the descendents of interbreeding between early homo-sapiens and early homo-Neanderthalenses that only developed into a more structured society later. Their highly barbarian society (as opposed to the highly tribal Greeks and Macedonians) doesn't really fit with a RECENT common descent though (for what my gutt feeling is worth - which is at least as much as any other person who studied ancient cultural history).
In the end, the only thing we know for an absolute fact about descent more than one thousand years old is that we are probably ALL descended from Africans our earliest human ancestors were probably dark skinned. Even THEN there are things we do not know - like did the Australian Aborigines split off from the same people who migrated to Europe ? Or did they reach Australia before the continents split ?
There is no way to know short of DNA research which nobody has done yet.
*No, the fact that it is written down is NOT proof to a historian. Alexander probably wouldn't lie about being Macedonian as it must have put a crimp on his career prospects, but we cannot know that he DIDN'T - and a king could easilly pretty damn sure that nothing ever gets written down that contradicts his story - so seriously, we have no real proof. Only tiny bits of supporting evidence, history is trying to figure out the most sensible explanations for them, knowing one of your students will probably come up with something better than you did and be too lazy to write in his paper.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
>I don't even want to imagine a computer with the developers' manual carved on it!
One of the Corinthian Letters mentioned in the bible actually was named "Read me first!" (in Corinthian Bold Condensed), but since they didn't understand what it was about, it was not included in the bible.
Maybe this is the true origin of the term Beowulf cluster. Beowulf, being the jock/bully, would see a nerd playing with his calculator and give him hell. The nerds responded by clustering together for protection and inadvertently discovered greater computing power.
Aside from the language chosen, I'm astonished that an AC actually posted something mildly funny!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Wiggin
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
I predicted these very first two posts. Ahhhh Slashdot, how your constant familiarities of Beowulf clusters, Linux, Soviet Union, Goatse and frosty pissers never tend to cease!
You must not be new here...
You forgot about us insensitive clods
That's just silly. Where then did Jesus's brothers ands sisters come from?
I agree, but for fairness' sake I'll add that some people think that "brothers and sisters" referred to his cousins (linguistically it's perhaps possible, but again, I agree with you: they were biological children of Mary and Joseph). Better evidence, IMO, is Matthew 1:25a: "But he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son." If that doesn't say they "did it", I don't know what would...
Anyway, the whole "virgin Mary" business is silly: Jesus was born of a virgin. Nothing says she had to remain a virgin after that. The idea of a "sinless Mary" is silly, too: "My soul doth magnify the Lord. / And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour." Savior from what, if she was sinless? And if she was sinless, Jesus wouldn't have had to die for sin: she could have done it.
Of course Joseph "knew" his wife. I think that was the mangu's point.
I know... I was responding to the quoted "Pillar of Faith". It was just too good to pass up... can't you picture Joseph? - "You mean we can't ever WHAT?!"
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Well, I'm an atheist (ok, more agnostic) and swift to blame religion myself. Butm to be entirely fair, I'm not sure why you blame the church there.
1. The early Franks were pretty proud that they're warriors, not scribes. They're not the only ones.
Charlemagne was the first monarch there who even tried to learn to write. Very late in life and, while he must be commended for his real efforts and time dedicated, it seems to have gone nowhere.
2. Antiquity itself wasn't that much more literate. Yes, in the middle ages only the rich learned to read and write. Guess what? The Hellots of Sparta and the poor of Rome, but especially _outside_ Rome weren't much richer and nobody taught them to read and write. And even in Egypt, while for the rich it was a thing of _pride_ to be literate (and addressing a letter "to your scribe" was a form of flattery, meaning, "I know you're your own scribe"), don't think that the poor working the fields had time to go to school.
We have a somewhat distorted view of Greece and Rome, in that basically we have a distorted tunnel view of it. We see the greatness of Athens at its peak, or Sparta... which were populated only with rich slave owners, whose only job was to be soldiers and philosophers. Athens additionally had managed to cheat the other Greek states, who had joined as _allies_ against Persia, with Athens as merely heading and organizing the army and funds, but found themselves actually turned into vassals of Athens and paying tribute as... well, more like a form of paying for protection. And not against the Persians, if you know what I mean.
So, yeah, the Athenians of Pericle could build great statues and temples, and sit around debating politics and philosophy, on the money of the whole rest of Greece and on the work of countless slaves. They _were_ the rich guys, and yeah, they could read and write. Big improvement over the Dark Ages, where also the rich guys could read and write, eh?
Ditto in Rome. We look mainly at what happened inside Rome itself, and the great democracy they had, but forget about the whole regions where they reduced the peasants to utter poverty by confiscating the lands and distributing the lands of a whole bloody province to half a dozen rich families. Again, we see the rich and maybe also middle classes this time, getting an education and living in nice cities. And a few slaves used as personal clerks. But forget about the 80% of the population, who was working the fields outside the cities, and who lived a heck of a lot worse and nobody educated those. Don't think that anyone educated the slaves in Sicily, which are documented to have been borderline starved and sometimes outright starved, so their masters could sell more grain to Rome. Or don't think that the slaves in the mines, which was little more than a slow death sentence, got educated first.
Ancient times were a lot shittier than some people assume. Maybe a little better than the darkest of the Dark Ages, but for most of the poor people, not by much or not at all.
3. Romans insisted on your learning Roman or Greek too, so...
4. What we inherited as the idea of the Dark Ages is, well, partially (though not totally) just the eternal circle of nihilism. Each time people go disillusioned, it seems to be a common reaction to go basically "OMG, our contemporary culture is nothing, we're living in the (new) Dark Ages" and "somewhere else / somewhere in the past, now that was Teh Golden Age, and the land of milk and honey!"
So back then, someone thought Rome was all that. Funnily enough, Rome at various points had thought Greece had been all that. And Greece had thought that their Mycaenean ancestors had been all that. And if you go forward in time instead, you find a disillusioned 19'th century England thinking that the middle ages had been such a golden age of chivalry. Some still do.
Others look with nostalgia at the peak of the age of disease, social injustice, broken social contracts, nobles _and_ cities plundering the former common lands
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I think you've mistaken the ancient Greeks for the Crab People. That's ok. It's a common mistake.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Hey, I am an insensitive clod you... oh wait.